1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to medical data accumulating and recording systems and in particular to a novel recording and storage system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Prior to this invention, overall diagnosis systems for automated multiphasic health testing systems generally utilized general purpose electronic computers for processing the data. However, the medical data which can be obtained from the results of physical examinations and diagnosis of physicians received from a number of examination facilities and from a variety of automatic examination equipment might be in the form of punched cards, marked cards, or marked sheets which carry codes for identifying the individual patient. Data media such as paper tapes and magnetic tapes produced by automatic examination equipment are ordinarily punched or marked manually and are carried to the elctronic computer room by the operator and placed in the card reader, marked sheet reader, paper tape reader, or magnetic tape reader of the computer. However, with such methods a great deal of processing time is required as well as a great possibility of errors being introduced into the system by the manual operation of the operators which might, for example, mispunch, miswrite, or lose data during transit. Thus, there is a great need to develop medical data storage, recording, and recovery apparatus which operates automatically and utilizes the development of automatic examination and measuring devices and instruments which can be directly connected to the data storage and retrieving system without requiring extensive use of manual operations.